Month: September 2013

I’m happy to report that, thanks to Alexei Skurikhin, Windows binaries are now available for all the functions in my CRF toolbox. Hopefully this makes for an easier out of the box experience from Windows folks who, based on my email, have struggled to compile things in the past.

I often find the academic convention of using Latin words and abbreviations a bit silly. (Though I’m as guilty as anyone.) Today, I decided to look into a couple common ones, to see if there is any good reason not to use the ordinary English equivalent.

“e.g.” is an abbreviation of the Latin “exemplī grātiā”, meaning “for example”. Here, “exemplī” is not hard to guess and “grātiā” means “for the sake of”.

“i.e.” is an abbreviation of the Latin “id est”, meaning “that is”.

“via”. This is not an abbreviation, but was the Latin word for a road. The plural is “viae”, which you should probably work into your next paper submission. (I think the usage would be “Linear convergence and entropic sparsity control viae quasi-stochasticity and entropy regulators”?)

“et al.”. Here “et” is Latin for “and” while “al.” is an abreviation for “alii”, meaning “others”. I seem to recall a major statistics journal maintaining the noble tradition of actually writing “and others”, but can’t recall which one.

I see no particular reason we haven’t adopted English words for all these conventions, but in the context of the many local optima society is in… this hardly seems worth changing.